… says Oliver Stone,
“Stalin, Hitler, Mao, McCarthy — these people have been vilified pretty thoroughly by history,” Stone told reporters at the Television Critics Association’s semi-annual press tour in Pasadena.
Lovely touch of moral equivalence between two mass-murderer dictators who ruled with impunity and an alcoholic senator who was taken down by a journalist, isn’t it?
That’s exactly why we “need” Oliver Stoned to explain it all to us, do we?
“Stalin has a complete other story,” Stone said. “Not to paint him as a hero, but to tell a more factual representation. He fought the German war machine more than any single person. We can’t judge people as only ‘bad’ or ‘good.’ Hitler is an easy scapegoat throughout history and its been used cheaply. He’s the product of a series of actions. It’s cause and effect … People in America don’t know the connection between WWI and WWII … I’ve been able to walk in Stalin’s shoes and Hitler’s shoes to understand their point of view. We’re going to educate our minds and liberalize them and broaden them. We want to move beyond opinions … Go into the funding of the Nazi party. How many American corporations were involved, from GM through IBM. Hitler is just a man who could have easily been assassinated.”
Of course! It’s all the evil American corporations’ fault! That must be it!
But why should anyone or anything be faulted? If Ollie really believes ” We can’t judge people as only ‘bad’ or ‘good,'” why bother have any judgment at all? Why not instead whore oneself with thugs, exactly the way Olly does with Hugo Chavez and that oil money.
Adolf and Stalin were not available for photo-ops
Stoned has the stones to refer to history as “events that at the time went under-reported, but crucially shaped America’s unique and complex history of the last 60 years,” such as,
President Harry Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan and the origins of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
since, of course, the media didn’t bother on either two “event”. But it’s all about empathy with Olly,
“You cannot approach history unless you have empathy for the person you may hate”
Well, if you believe that, you’ll probably sit and watch Olly’s history rewrite… with empathy, of course.
Let’s just hope Ollie wasn’t the talent behind that FARC propaganda video doing the rounds which shows the lovely pastoral agrarian FARC “fighting capitalism single-handedly” because no one else does.
Here’s the video, if you don’t remember it from the other day,
After all, the FARC would tell you they have been “vilified pretty thoroughly” too.
It’s all about the empathy.
He can’t fall lower, can he? But it’s the normal stage in his evolution after both Castro and Chávez’s documentaries.
I’m sure that if he lived in those “poor-mass-murderers-who nobody-can-feel-empathy-with”‘s territories he wouldn’t be able to write against them with the same freedom he has now. Of course, he feels no empathy with their citizens, just with the mass murderers/dictators/etc.
Interesting priorities!
Useful idiot. Like Carter, Stone has never met a dictator he didn’t like. Hopefully he will also include all the liberal pen pals Hitler had like FDR. Maybe he’ll also cover how JFK and McCarthy were buddies and that Bobby was an aide to Joe? I wonder if he’ll also cover the “purges” in the Soviet Union that started under Lenin? I would say that executing 10 million plus of your own people qualifies you as a bad person. Maybe that’s just my me?
This is the cracked-brained relativistic thinking that brought us the crime explosion of the 60’s and 70’s.
It is also the reason we tolerate the junior Hitlers and Stalins currently in our midst.
I love it when Holly-Weird speaks. It is the appeal to authority logical fallacy writ large: Even a brilliant filmmaker can be a complete moron when he gets outside his (very narrow) area of expertise.
But relativism never applies when talking about the evil knuckle-draggin’ Bible-thumpers. Nor does relativism apply when talking about the evil ignorant racist Rethuglicans. Nor does it apply when talking about the hate-filled Teabaggers.
My favorite line from the FARC video was where he said that “We don’t produce coca, we don’t produce marijuana. We only produce food.” Yeah, right. They sell the yucca to purchase rifles and bullets, right?
Hi Fausta,
while obviously I empathise with your post, I also do think that it would really be great if we ever COULD get the REAL history of past events. I know this is just so much wishful thinking for the most part, however to take the Hitler example, it is a no-brainer to say he was an evil fucking nightmare and deserved to die, die, die. I have studied the whole Nazi thing as I refer to it for years because since the age of 7 it just didn’t seem to make any fucking sense to me. The official versions of history just didn’t “fit” in my opinion with how real humans go about in real life. It is only through much reading of actual documents of the time, of verifiably true (or at least very highly so) documents, films and so on that eventually what I would consider the real picture of how such a nightmare as the holocaust could even have taken place emerges and it’s no-where NEAR as clear-cut as they tell you in school.
Please understand, I am in no way any kind of nazi-sympathiser or revisionist, I am merely after the truth of facts and I do find it that conveniently “forgetting” to mention that Hitler himself was half-Jewish, or that he was decorated by a jewish officer in the first world war, or so many “little” things that when taken together actually DO explain more of the psychology of this psychopathic mass-murderer is actually a dis-service to humanity. I think the truth is important. And while Nazism certainly appears as a completely unreal thing…that a whole people could be so utterly …inhuman…the fact is it requires factual understanding of factual things to begin to understand how and why it could ever have existed.
I always find the truth more fascinating than fiction and while your post ultimately was about stone’s stupidity (you will not generally hear argument there from me regarding hollywood as a whole) I do think that while I abhor relativism utterly and completely, I do think sometimes we do need to question the accepted norm. The truth is sometimes stranger than the fiction we are fed.